1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to temporally defining virtual communities, and specifically to a system and method for analyzing customer transactions, such as purchases, in a commercial setting, as well as analyzing customer interactions, such as via browsing on the Internet
2. Description of the Prior Art
Presently, there exist systems that capture purchase transactions about customers. This information may be loaded into a scaleable data warehouse (SDW) for analysis by marketing personnel to determine product correlations, trends in sales, brand and color preferences, and trends in buying behavior based on demographics, psychographics, or geography. These systems may perform market basket analysis (products bought together at the same time), propensity analysis (buying product X predicts a subsequent purchase of product Y), or customer segmentation (defining a set of customers that buy or may buy a certain product or products).
These systems include the Knowledge Discovery Workbench available from NCR, the Management Discovery Tool available from NCR and the software available from Sterling Douglas which is used to create predictions of sales volumes.